I have this friend, and I’m not going to mention any names of course, but I have a friend who has very, very little talent when it comes to having a party. I guess his heart is in the right place and all, but all the things that really make a party work, even a little dinner, just aren’t quite right. If you arrive a little hungry, and you’re hoping there are some appetizers out that you can take the edge off with, you will probably be disappointed. There’s wine available, which is good, but there are the tiniest wine glasses you can imagine, beautiful, but fragile and tiny, so that if you go back multiple times, as you would need to if you want an actual glass of wine, or at least what I think of as a glass of wine, you’ll feel guilty for making such a pig of yourself in front of everyone. And lastly, as often as not, the host of this dinner party is off in the kitchen almost all of the time, so that the person who you thought wanted to see you isn’t very available at all.
So what does this have to do with the famous wedding at Cana in the gospel today? Yes, this wedding was a better party, and Jesus made it clear that a party that runs out of wine is a failure that needs to be corrected. But this wedding banquet isn’t just any wedding banquet. There’s something here we are meant to see. All throughout the scriptures, we’re told that a wedding banquet is the ultimate image of what God has had in mind for the people of God all along. It’s the best image apparently that God could come up with for something that represents fullness of life, joy, a celebration of the future, every generation gathered together, a host that doesn’t hold anything back. And Jesus represents the best wine that was saved for later, the wedding feast that has turned even all the past ones upside down, not only does the wine never run out, but it’s wine that gets better as time goes on. There is an abundance, it’s overwhelming, it’s almost wasteful how much of this wine gets brought on to the scene, just to make a point.
And the point is this: Is this kind of a banquet the way we see God? Is this what we think is the kind of relationship with God that is available to us? I think much of the time we don’t see God welcoming us to this huge and unmistakable and lively sense of God’s presence. We think God is like my bad host. We think that God holds a lot back, that God hands out a sense of his presence in tiny little wine glasses, that God’s voice is really, really hard to hear and beyond our meager abilities, we think that prayer is an austere Olympic sport that most people can’t even attempt to compete in, that God’s desires for this world and for us are pretty inscrutable, that God may love us but it’s from a great distance, it’s like a generous but reclusive relative, or like a host who never comes out of the kitchen to embrace his guests.
But God wants us to understand that no, there is this banquet under way, and if we don’t realize it it’s not that we’re not worthy of this banquet, it’s that our expectation of what God is is so cramped. The signs of God’s presence in our lives are not as tiny and quiet as we think — we’re simply not ready to recognize those signs for what they are: the love that surrounds us, the people who have held us up when we needed it, the pull that we feel to help the helpless, even this group of people gathered here today, they are all shouting to us about this banquet where we are already guests and that everyone is part of. We’re pretty good at under-recognizing these experiences of grace, so we let them pass, we decide that they don’t mean much, or we think yes, they mean something, but that our unworthiness overshadows everything. And maybe that’s really what keeps us on the outside of this banquet, this is why we can’t talk to God like someone who takes great pleasure in our company, it’s that sense that we haven’t earned God wanting to share this with us, that we’re damaged goods. Seeing God as that kind of a very reluctant host with a limited guest list and only a few glasses, that is how we work our own miracle that humans are so good at, turning the wine that we’re being offered back into water.
You know, those early Christians in Corinth that we heard about in the second reading, the ones with all the gifts that St. Paul was trying to encourage and maybe get under control, they seemed to have the right idea about this. Think about it, they had all been Christians basically for about five minutes, they came from pagan backgrounds, in this community there were all sorts of disagreements and imperfections and people with colorful and diverse histories who worked at cross purposes. They drove Paul crazy. But, there was this. They’d been opened up by a sense that something huge had begun, that they had gifts to help one another they didn’t realize they had, and that God was acting on their community in some ways that were not at all subtle or invisible. They took risks, because they had come to see that God was closer and larger and more generous than they had ever imagined that God could be. They were so overcome by it all that they took a chance that they really did have the gifts they thought they had. They weren’t worried that the grace of God was going to run out.
What it seems to boil down to is this. If you are still looking for a God who is like a bad human host, parsimonious and distant, that may be what you will find when you look for him. But if you are looking for the God who is just now opening up the good wine, then ask God to be welcomed into this banquet. Apparently it’s where we have all belonged all along.